This afternoon I saw Rovero and Juliet at the Palmerston Library. I had hoped to have a kid with me but he couldn’t come so I was there on my own. I was a bit concerned that it would seem weird, an adult at a kid’s show without a kid but I needn’t have worried. We made up about half the audience.
The show is a re-telling of the Shakespeare play but with puppets and a happy ending. In this play the feud is between the Muttagues and the Catulets, the nurse is a cow and the friar is a camel. All the characters find true love, so it’s a happy ending all round. Continue reading Rovero and Juliet (The Manipulators) 2013 Toronto Fringe Review→
Steven Gallagher in Stealing Sam had me laughing, crying and on my feet clapping loudly by the end of the show. Whatever he was selling throughout his stellar performance, I bought into it. If you are looking for a Toronto Fringe show that tells a compelling honest story then Stealing Sam at the Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse is a show you don’t want to miss!
Now what would you expect if you see an average-looking middle-aged man dragging his medium-sized suitcase with him as he walked on to the stage? That maybe you are about to see a show of a typical business-like man who is possibly leaving town? Or maybe that he has a dead body inside his big suitcase and that body happens to be Sam? Neither of which is true. What you see is not always what you get. And that really is the underlying premise of the whole story.
The Servant of Two Masters,presented by Fly With Us at Factory Theatre, is a modern take on Carlo Goldoni’s Commedia dell’arte play about about the chaos brought about from an opportunistic servant. The servant, Truffaldino, fools Beatrice – who is disguised as her dead brother Federigo – and Florindo into thinking he is a loyal servant to each of them alone. Things become hectic as he attempts to hide the fact that he in fact has two employers and two payments.
Urge For Going has actors, puppets, musicians, projections and animation. That’s a lot going on in this Fringe show from Quality Slippers Productions, probably too much. Most of these elements are quite good by themselves but they don’t meld seamlessly together. Often they seemed to be there solely to distract me from the weaknesses of the script.
The story is of a fourteen year old girl named Carrie who lives in small town Saskatchewan. It is 2013, just as it is now, and her grandmother gives her a Joni Mitchell cassette tape. She somehow manages to find a way to play a cassette and falls in love with Joni and with 1960’s hippie idealism in general. She plans to run away to Toronto to become a folk singer. Continue reading Urge For Going (Quality Slippers Productions) 2013 Toronto Fringe Review→
A multimedia experience, The Taliban Don’t Like My Knickers is a stylized two-hander inspired by the novel ‘In The Hands of the Taliban’ written by British journalist Yvonne Ridley after she was captured by the Taliban in 2001. With Taliban video footage playing constantly in the background, I was expecting something extremely exciting and uncomfortable to watch.
This afternoon I saw Rovero and Juliet at the Palmerston Library. I had hoped to have a kid with me but he couldn’t come so I was there on my own. I was a bit concerned that it would seem weird, an adult at a kid’s show without a kid but I needn’t have worried. We made up about half the audience.
